Mobile computing devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDA), have become increasingly popular in recent years. As the devices continue to get smaller, there are increasing limitations in resources such as memory, storage, bandwidth, and battery. Additionally, more applications now require increasing levels of such resources. For example, many applications execute recurring tasks such as synchronization with a server and real-time content updates that require frequent radio usage to persist connections. After the radio powers on to send data, the radio takes several seconds to power off (e.g., about 3 seconds on 2.5G networks and about 20 seconds on 3G networks). This radio “tail” absorbs power and diminishes device battery life. Further, there are other power inefficiencies in spinning up the radio and shutting down the radio.
Connected applications with real-time data push are being widely adopted by mobile users. The applications include electronic mail, personal information management, and other web applications. The servers pushing the data do not have enough device and network knowledge to preserve device battery life while providing a positive user experience.